The new WordPress plugin Travel Search by Travelgrove provides a one-step travel search engine, that allows users to search and compare airfare prices, hotel room rates, car rentals and vacation packages provided by a large scale of travel companies from the biggest providers of the market to special aggregators, travel agents and negotiators.

This plugin was built for many reasons:

for the visitors of your site: to provide a search box helping them find the best rates on flights, hotel rooms and vacation packages.

for you: to provide you with a new source of income and to add value to your travel-related website.

for our affiliates: to provide easy ways to implement our boxes.

for us: to guarantee more visibility to our travel partners.

Based on the success and popularity of the current plugin, we plan to complement the Travel Search plugin with real-time airfare prices, best current deals and fare ticket history.

In order to properly track the commissions and leads generated by your site, you must register as a Travelgrove Affiliate. The searchbox will work fine for non-registered sites as well, however to get paid you must first register by following these simple steps:

1.) Customize the searchbox on the next admin screen by setting up the preferred date format as well as default departure and return dates:

default date settings

Departure date is always relative to the current date and is calculated based on current time (your server’s current time) + the offset you select.

Return date is calculated based on departure date and it is relative to that.

These dates will be used as flights departure/return dates, hotel check-in/check-out dates, vacation dates and car rentals pick-up/drop-off dates.

2.) Set up default ‘From’ and ‘To’ locations or leave those fields empty. Default options will be used only if no other locations will be specified while adding the box to a post (see below at usage). Just click into the input, start typing then select an airport from the suggestion list:

Setting up default airports

To ease the setup process, the same locations will be copied to empty inputs, so if you add “New York City (NYC)” as destination on the Flight tab, it will be copied automatically to hotels, car rentals and vacation tab.

The WordPress TinyMCE editor integration is the part of this plugin we are the most proud of.

We think using our boxes via the built-in editorial interface could not be easier since it is 100% wordpress-compatible using the very same interface any blogger is using while adding an image to a post, so if you can manage to add a picture to a post you can manage Travelgrove Searchboxes as well.

Here are the steps to follow for adding a box to one of your posts:

1.) Move the cursor inside the box at the position where you want to insert the box.

A very similar pop-up box (“thickbox”) will appear as the one for the media upload:

Travelgrove searchboxes in the thickbox popup

3.) On the given screen, select the desired size by simply clicking it (160×600, 300×250, 300×533, 728×90 or dynamic).

Note that “dynamic” refers to dynamic width searchbox – the one that fits all designs since it fills in the available room so no large empty areas will appear around the box.

4.) Select the tab you would like to be opened by default by simply clicking it (Flight, Hotels, Packages, Cars)

5.) Enter departure and arrival locations and select travel dates, or leave the fields empty, up to you.

6.) Hit the “Insert Box” button and done. You should see something similar inside the visual editor:

As you can see on the screenshot, an image with the same dimensions as the box will appear inside the visual editor, thus not breaking the design of your page inside the editor. No surprises will appear when you publish your post.

Editing present searchboxes in a post can be done in the same way as you edit an image – click the box and choose from the options (edit, delete).

Adding one of the search boxes anywhere on your blog — i.e. inside the header, footer, right or left sidebar, attachment pages or anything else you can think of — is as easy as copy-pasting a line into the right template file, by following these basic steps:

2.) Select the time period you want to see the revenue for (Yesterday, Last week, This month, Last month) or enter exact dates and hit ‘Go’

Your stats report will look like this (just not that blurry ;-) ):

Travelgrove Traffic and Revenue Stats

Please note that we are refining the monthly stats at the end of the each month, so the numbers might slightly change in both directions (usually they don’t).

At the beginning of each month you will receive your paycheck for the previous month (via actual check or paypal). You can follow your monthly payouts here (please note that checks are only sent once payment thresholds are reached).

Feel free to contact us for support by leaving a comment here or by sending an email to tech[at]travelgrove[dot]com, considering the following points:

1.) Please add “Travel Searchboxes WordPress Plugin” in the subject line and mention both your unique Affiliate ID and the URL of your website.

2.) Keep in mind that a picture is worth a thousand words, so please attach one or more screenshots to your bug report.

3.) Also please understand that we are programmers, engineers and managers handling our daily businesses inside the company and running many different projects in more countries and in several languages, thus we might not respond to each request in the shortest time but we take each bug report seriously, since we think quality matters.

We might not fix each reported issue one by one as they appear but collect them and fix them together in further releases and version updates.

Just to recapitulate – install the plugin, register to Travelgrove and start earning money today by blogging about your favorite travel deals or travel destinations, discount cheap flights you find on the net or bargain hotel room rates. Tell your fellow travelers where and when to travel, and provide our box as the searching platform, thus making everyone satisfied.

Of course. They just have to run a search with their criteria, select the providers they like and book their flight on the providers’ pages.

Cheers

Deepak wrote on December 8, 2012:

Hi,I want to sort the cities in ascending order in “from” drop down list,fetching from one of the database table.I am not able to identify which file I should update.Could you please help me out in this.

Tech wrote on December 10, 2012:

Hi @Deepak,

Unfortunately you cannot do that right now. The items in the list are sorted based on an internal best match logic + popularity.

Thomas wrote on February 21, 2013:

Hi,

Is there any option to find travel buddy

Tech wrote on February 21, 2013:

Hi Thomas,

I’m not sure what you mean, but if you refers to services finding you a travel buddy that’s not available at this time.

Regards

filip wrote on March 5, 2013:

hi there,is it posible to have an option in search box with flexible dates. something like “sort by price” for a period (let’s say 3 months). that means to search without input a date of arrive or departure.best regards,filip

Tech wrote on March 5, 2013:

Hi Filip,

Unfortunately flexible date search is not available yet, but it just made our to-do list!

When I signed up I thought I read that affiliates got paid by the search, How exactly do you pay, by the search or commission on each sale. This might be a good thing to have in the affiliate control panel.

Week ago I have asked for your permission to translate your Travel Search plugin and I didn’t hear any from you since. I hope that you will find time to provide the reply, because we believe that the translation would be of a great use.

I have been tying To get somebody to help me, I have contacted travel grove,this will be the fifth time. four times with no response. I can really use some information why the departure and return date calender boxes do not work, with my WordPress custom community theme by theme kraft. when everything else works fine with it. please go to http://www.flylately.com to see what I mean. any help would be greatly appreciated.

Tech wrote on January 20, 2014:

Hi Mike,

Sorry for not getting back to your emails – not sure which email address did you use, but actually we have not seen any communication from FlyLately.com.

We are working on the issue you’ve reported – will let you know at once it’s fixed.

I want to be affiliate and want to use your search engine. Is there any option where user can use currency conversion. For example if I want to use it for Indian public then it should display the price in rupees. So is there that option available?RegardsPalash

Tech wrote on February 5, 2014:

Hi Palash,

Currently we target US market only, however we added the currency/market selection to our todo list.

Have you added the option to choose to search only specified services, for example only flight, or rental cars and flights only. Offering all the searches conflicts with some of our services.

sherry wrote on February 27, 2014:

HiI have a little problem. I installed the plugin, and registered with you but the submit button does not work. Nothing happens. It does let me select the sites I want to compare but once selected, compare button does nothing. Is there something I should be doing.ps. the plugin is inserted into a page.Thank you

sherry wrote on February 28, 2014:

hii need help with this plugin. not sure why the submit button is not working. wordpress did an automatic upgrade to version 3.8.1. could this cause a problem?also can i embed the search results in our websites rather than it going to travel grove site?how?any help would be appreciated.thankssherry

sherry wrote on March 1, 2014:

Hi Thank you but this problem is resolved. WordPress updated itself and everything is working fine, after a clean re-installation of the plugin.

My only query is how to make the search results appear in our site rather than going to travelgrove site.. when using the code from our account..Appreciate any help. I haven’t received any feedback yet.

Tech wrote on March 3, 2014:

Hi @sherry,

Good to hear that!Unfortunately currently there is no option for showing the results on your page yet it is something we might add later on, however will take some time till we get there.

Best Regards,Travelgrove Team

Tech wrote on March 3, 2014:

Hi John,

Unfortunately the option you asked for is not currently available.We might add it later on, but will take some time till we get there.

Hi, I just found your plugin and it seems very interesting but I would like to know if it is support by a french version or if you know a way I can translate it easily. I usually use the codestyling-localization plugin but it doesn’t seem to work with Travel Search since it don’t appears in the possible stuff to translate.

Do you know another easy way?

Eff wrote on July 30, 2014:

Hi, was wondering if I can use this only to show hotel info, no prices.? If not do you know any plugin tat does?

Tech wrote on July 31, 2014:

Hi Jeffrey,

Unfortunately we don’t offer such functionality now and are not aware of others doing that… sorry we couldn’t help more,

Best Regards,The Travelgrove Team

Ire wrote on August 7, 2014:

Hi,Please advice can I use your plugin for Japanese and Russian market.WBWS

Ire wrote on August 7, 2014:

I would like to use it for Japanese company, registration in Japan. Is it possible? Going to translate also for Japanese and Russian language.

Tech wrote on August 7, 2014:

Hi Ire,

Unfortunately we cannot approve that, since our target market is the US.

Is there a way visitors won’t leave main website and get feeds within the main website content box ?

Tech wrote on August 20, 2014:

Hi Sameer,

Unfortunately that something which is not currently available. We might add a feed box later but there’s no ETA on that yet..

Best Regards,The Travelgrove Team

Tech wrote on August 21, 2014:

Hi Annik,

Unfortunately our plugin is available only in English at this time,

Best Regards,The Travelgrove Team.

Tech wrote on August 21, 2014:

Hi Jena,

Not sure what do you mean – please send a detailed request to tech [at] travelgrove [dot] com.

Goodluck Bahati wrote on September 2, 2014:

Hi Tech,

I have a client am developing for a site his company that deals with tour and travel. Your plugin is good but am not able to get all the places in Somalia (All Airports in Somali).

Please let me know about that and also how can i get a pro version of the plugin.

Abe wrote on September 16, 2014:

Hello, will this inventory be showe on my wordpress and will the whole operation be fulfilled there, or will the plugin redirect the customer to travelgrove?

Tech wrote on September 17, 2014:

Dear Abe,

The plugin will redirect the customer to the selected advertisers.That being said, all operations take place inside the WordPress Plugin – the users enter their search details, select travel providers to their check offers and hit search.

Best Regards,The Travelgrove Team.

Ankur wrote on October 13, 2014:

Great, but this plugin is US based, are you planning to make same plugin for other countries, e.g. compare data of major travel site from India

Tech wrote on October 13, 2014:

Hi Ankur,

Currently we support & target US only.Other geographical targets will be added later on.